This story really tickles me for some reason. Maybe it’s because of the sudden seeming obsession with and elevation of AI as a very important thing, coupled with prominent people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warning about our grim SkyNET future if we don’t keep an eye on it.
You can find this story all over but here’s Ars Technica’s: Unprompted, creepy laughter from Alexa is is freaking out Echo owners
In short, Amazon’s Echo smart speaker is randomly laughing due to a bug. It sounds like the start of a horror movie.
The kitchen is quiet. You’ve just come home from work and set your keys on the counter. You haven’t turned on the lights yet, so it’s dark, the only light filtering in through the closed curtain over the sink. You don’t notice the soft glowing edge of the Amazon Echo over on the far end of the counter. But the moment the keys hit that same counter you hear it. A laugh. You swivel around, startled. It stops and you turn back and notice the lit-up ring on the top of the Echo. Did they keys wake it up? That shouldn’t be possible.
And even if it did, why would it laugh?
You stand for a few seconds to see if anything else happens. It remains quiet, so you flick on the light switch. And hear the laughter again. This time you are looking directly at the Echo and it’s clearly the source of the laughter. You’ve never heard Alexa laugh before. It’s unnerving and illogical. You think it must be a bug. You’ll look it up later on the internet (suddenly the thought of using Alexa for the task is incredibly unappealing). For now you decide to unplug it. You’ve just come home from work. You want to relax, not be harassed by a defective hundred dollar AI. You reach behind the Echo to pull the plug and wonder what you’d do if it kept laughing after…
